RD3

His resurrection has all the characteristics of an origin story for a Hollywood superhero: A gifted young actor loses his way, cheats death again and again, then straightens himself out just in time to conquer the world. But the way Robert Downey Jr. tells it, the reality involves a lot more detours, and the final act still hasn't been written. With Iron Man 3 poised to extend his outrageous hot streak, Downey invited GQ's Chris Heath to his house in Malibu to talk about where he's been, where he's going, and where all the demons went

Robert Downey Jr. habitually carries with him a miniature brown leather suitcase. If he's rummaging inside it, it's usually for another square of Nicorette gum, but there's all sorts of stuff in there: rattling pill bottles—antiparasitics and antivirals ("Sushi's worth it, but sometimes you've got to clean the bugs out") and some kind of chemical if he happens to eat bread—a dark blue beanie bearing the logo of the security company that guards this Malibu estate, some medallions whose twins I'll later see his wife, Susan, wearing, and a typed letter he recently received from Woody Harrelson onto the back of which he has, perhaps absentmindedly, been pressing chewed globs of gum. There is also—and this is what he removes now from the case to show me—a solid-gold Iron Man helmet head.

Downey holds in his hands the head of the character who set his life on a new trajectory and examines it.

"It is funny, dude," he says. "I do contemplate this thing."

Downey commissioned a jeweler to make a set of these heads as gifts for crew members when Iron Man 3 wrapped, but he kept one for himself and it is now his to ponder at his leisure. "There's some sort of strange message about something in there," he says. "Just about masks, and what people create. I still haven't figured it out. There's no rush."

···

Downey remembers staring at an image of that stoic gleaming helmet, as he tried to work out what it would take to be the man inside it, when he was preparing for his Iron Man audition in 2006. It is easy to forget what a strange place Robert Downey's career was in back then, and not just because of the long trail of upheavals—the drugs, the guns, the arrests, the rehabs, the prison sentences—that could have destroyed it.

For years, whenever Downey appeared on TV, he was routinely introduced as "one of the greatest actors of his generation." (Downey's demeanor on such occasions suggested that such statements expressed a truth so obvious it barely needed repeating.) What was less apparent, until you looked with a cold empirical stare at the whole sweep of his career, was that he was also one of the least successful actors of his generation, almost unbelievably so. The biggest hit he had ever been in was the long-forgotten 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, which came out when he was 21. After that, no matter what fanfare each new movie arrived with, and no matter how often Downey's own contribution would be highlighted, it was disappointment after disappointment. His two best and most notable performances in those years were in Less Than Zero and Chaplin, but both were commercial flops. When he chose movies so commercial that their success seemed predestined—Air America in 1990 with perhaps the biggest star of that era, Mel Gibson; The Fugitive sequel, U.S. Marshals, in 1998—the rebuke of their failure seemed almost humiliating.

Downey suggests now that he began to see this pattern as a statistical aberration. "The odds were against it," he argues. "Most people, they've been around twenty years or more, just even by accident they were in something that made a ton of dough." But that was the one accident he seemed incapable of getting himself into. At times, he'd wonder if it was worth it. "Some part of me," he says, "and this is maybe some injured part of me, has been looking to say 'I quit! I retire!' since whenever."

Still, in the middle of the past decade things started looking up. He married the film producer Susan Levin, finally seemed to be putting some sustainable distance between himself and his addiction problems, started doing what he considered "solid work with people I liked to work with," and discovered that he was, as he puts it, "incredibly happy." Yet a certain kind of success (the kind, let's be blunt, commonly known just as "success") continued to elude him. In 2005 it happened once again, this time with the comedic noir Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. This was a particularly tough blow—it was well reviewed, Downey was proud of his part in it, and his wife had produced it. "And then," he remembers, "watching it come out and make eighty-five bucks..."

I ask him what he was thinking at that point.

"In two words: 'Where's mine?' "

He might've been justified in concluding that this was how it would be from now on—that the moment for Downey to be a star had passed, and he should expect the same future as many other talented middle-aged actors: occasional good parts in small movies, occasional small parts in big movies, maybe an extended run in one of the new breed of smart TV dramas. But Downey remained stubbornly confident that his was still out there somewhere. "I felt like a fighter who was training for a title bout that had not been booked yet," he says.

Then he heard about Iron Man. Knowing what we know now, Downey's fixation on the role makes the best possible sense. But nothing was so obvious at the time. Starring as a Marvel comic-book hero on the big screen might sound like a sure route to a big audience and guaranteed success, but plenty of actors had already learned otherwise. (Ask Eric Bana. Or Edward Norton. Or Ben Affleck. Or Jennifer Garner.) And Iron Man wasn't even considered in the first tier of Marvel heroes.

But Downey was obsessed with the notion that the part should be his. "I don't know why," he says. "I do like a bit of Jung, and it was just this kind of numinous thing." Even after the film's director, Jon Favreau, passed on the word from Marvel that it wasn't going to happen, Downey refused to listen. (Favreau later explained that Marvel had actually been even more definite: "Under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him for any price.") Downey persisted nonetheless, and eventually he was told he'd at least get a screen test.